Faculty Seminar: A Colonial Muslim History of Chinese Central Asia

Professor Eric Schluessel, an  expert on Turkic Muslim legal and religious culture in Central Asia from the University of Montana, was a recent Faculty Seminar Series visiting scholar, where he discussed “A Colonial Muslim History of Chinese Central Asia: Revisiting Sayrāmī’s Tārīkh-i Ḥamīd.”

The seminar, moderated by Professor Max Oidtmann, focused on the work of Mullah Musa Sayrami, a Turkic-speaking Muslim and historian from Xinjiang (East Turkestan), known for his contributions to Uyghur literature and his account of the events in the region in the nineteenth century. Schluessel explained how Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī, a colonial text chronicling Muslim uprisings in Qing China, “explains historical trauma and Chinese dominance by imagining an idealized Qing past.” Professor Schluessel is also a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in 2019-2020, and the author of a forthcoming book on the history of Uyghurs in nineteenth-century Qing China.

Faculty Seminars

The GU-Q Faculty Seminars are an annual series in which GU-Q faculty and guests present research in progress and receive feedback from other faculty members. The central goal is to further faculty’s research by offering opportunities both to present ideas and to learn from the ideas of others from GU-Q, Education City, and beyond.